Page 112 of Power Play

I did. It broke tight and sharp and ran all through me, every muscle pulling down around him, my heels locked at the base of his spine and his name coming apart in my mouth. He put his forehead to mine and went over right after, buried deep, shaking into me, and stayed close while it ran out of both of us.

After, he didn’t shift off right away, and when he did he brought me with him so I landed on his chest, and he pulled the blanket up over my back and set his hand flat between my shoulder blades and left it there, heavy.

“You’re staying,” he said.

“I’m staying.”

He pushed the damp hair off my face and studied me a while, checking me over, head to foot, the completeness he gave to anything that was his. I lay there warm against a man who knew exactly what he had, and for a while I let the day go.

He told me later, once we’d drifted back out to the kitchen for water because I still couldn’t make the day lie down.

The kitchen after was the good quiet, the dishwasher ticking through its cycle and the one lamp on in the front room. I was wiping a counter that didn’t need it. He was leaning against the far one with a glass of water, and he’d been working up to it since the car. I’d clocked it, because I clocked everything in that house. It was the one skill I’d come with.

“Katya’s coming,” he said.

I kept the cloth moving, because my hands kept going through almost anything. They were always the last part of me to quit. “Oh?”

“Week after next. For a week.” He turned the glass a quarter-turn on the counter. “She wants time with Iris. Over the holidays.”

“That’s good,” I said. “That’s really good. For Iris. That’s good for Iris.”

I said good three times, which for me was a tell the size of a billboard, and I made myself stop, because I knew what the three goods were covering and it wasn’t a kind thing to be feeling. The mother was coming. The one person in this house who had never once had to earn her place in it, who’d been handed it in a delivery room and kept it from a distance without folding a single load of laundry or learning which book Iris needed when she was scared, was about to walk through the door and be, on arrival and by right, the woman I’d spent the fall quietly building myself into without anyone’s permission. I had the role memorized down to the stitching. It wasn’t mine. He was watching me. He watched everything in that house completely, me included, and I kept my face where I’d put it and folded the cloth in half and then in half again.

“She’ll stay at a hotel,” he said. “Downtown. Iris’ll go back and forth.”

“Of course.” I squared the folded cloth with the edge of the counter. “I’ll get a bag ready. The good leggings. The book about the ocean. She’ll want the book about the ocean.”

“Delaney.”

“I’ll do it tomorrow. It’s no trouble. I know where everything⁠—”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You didn’t ask anything,” I said, which was true, and wasn’t the point, and we both knew it wasn’t the point.

He watched me a while longer. I had a dozen questions and every one of them had my name in it, and I couldn’t ask a single one, because there was no version of where do I go while she’s here that didn’t make me say out loud what I was, and I didn’t have the word for what I was, and I wasn’t going to be the one who went first hunting for it in his kitchen at ten at night.

So I said, “Is she still with the⁠—”

“I don’t know,” he said. “We don’t talk about that.”

“Right.”

“It’s a week,” he said. “It’s for Iris.”

“I know.” I put the cloth over the faucet to dry, lined up how he liked it, and I smiled at him, the organized one, the good one, the one I’d been wearing since August. “It’s a week.”

He didn’t buy it. He let me have it anyway, the same as he’d let the wings be the internet. He pushed off the counter and came across the kitchen and put his hand on the back of my neck, under my hair, and he didn’t kiss me, he just held his hand there with my pulse running up against it, and I stood very still and let a man hold the back of my neck in a kitchen that wasn’t mine, in a life that wasn’t mine, with a dragon asleep down the hall who wasn’t mine either.

“Bag can wait till Sunday,” he said.

“Okay.”

It wasn’t okay. Sunday was far away, though, and his hand was warm, and I was so good now at deciding things were fine, and I decided it, one more time, as I’d been deciding it all along.

CHAPTER 25

Eli